If there is one area of IT where an objective opinion is needed, it might be storage. The disk versus flash battle is raging, and conflicting advice is not hard to come by. The flash guy says that no disk storage will ever be as fast as flash; then the disk company rep counters that flash will never be as cheap as disk. To complicate matters more, some companies say that their disk-flash hybrid is faster than flash alone. So what’s the bottom line on the fastest storage for your buck — flash, disk or anything in between?

Randy Arseneau, CMO of Infinidat, and Steve Kenniston, VP of Product Marketing at INFINIDAT, talked with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Marc Farley (@gofarley), host and guest host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2016.

Kenniston said that media is only one factor — the way they are used by the architecture can make a world of difference. His company offers a storage solution that combines disk and flash. “We had some technical presentations that were talking about how our system can beat all-flash systems with real-life workloads,” he said, claiming that all-flash figures are somewhat inflated.

Why the disk won’t die

Arseneau said that five years ago flash-storage proponents were predicting that disk would be obsolete by now. Why haven’t we seen this come to pass?

“The elasticity and the pricing hasn’t happened at the rate they predicted, and the spinning drive manufacturers haven’t slowed down, they haven’t stopped innovating, they’re constantly driving up areal density, they’re driving down power consumption, they’re improving reliability,” he said.

Cloud proofing

Arseneau told Miniman and Farley that disks stopped getting faster in 1992, so you’re not going to build faster storage exclusively with disk. “However, flash is a tremendous caching layer,” he said, adding that combining these two in the right architecture produces the best ratio of speed to expense available.

Asked about how the explosion of cloud infrastructure will affect storage, Kenniston answered, “The more you hear about cloud, everybody almost looks up and says, ‘It’s just there,’ right? But that data has to go some place. A big part of our install base is our cloud service providers.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE